I've known plenty of people who kept shotguns loaded with rocksalt shells for trespassers. I've also had them fired at me during my misguided youth. If having shells ready implied premeditation, then anyone who owns a baseball bat and not in a league could be also.

It's not difficult to take the pellets out of a shell and put rocksalt in. The end of the shell is simply folded plastic and is very easy to unfold. The pellets are directly underneath the plastic, no wadding either, so you can simply pour the pellets out. Using a funnel or even a folded peice of paper, you can dump the salt in and press the plastic ends together. I'd prefer to use one of my presses for this, but you can do so without if needed. With a butter knife, a peice of paper and a solid flat surface, I could do it in under 2 minutes.

I haven't gone hunting in several decades, but I did when I was younger. I've had pellets from careless people's shotgun rain down on me a couple times. No, they don't maintain their lethality It'll scare the hell out of you, but it's not even close to lethal.

It's not clear from TFA, but it does say that the drone crashed in a field behind his house and that he fired at the drone when it was over his property and that he did not fire over other residences.

I don't know the full details of the story, so I'll reserve judgment, but I'd be inclined to do the same myself, depending on the situation. I'd probably use rock salt rather than lead though.

That'll be the FIAT that owns Ferrari and Maserati, which are quite well thought of.

Quite well thought of by teenagers who have no clue as to the ongoing cost and other things that go along with owning them.

A Ferrari has to be taken in for a "tune up" every 15,000 miles. That "tune-up" will set you back about $7000. I can buy a new crate engine from GM for my base model Corvette for $5K and the labor to have it installed will be less than $2K.

Ferrari also neglected to set the change interval for the coolant in may late models. So once the anti corrosives in the coolant breakdown, the radiators start to clog and overheat.

Don't get me wrong, they are beautiful cars, and a hell of a lot of fun to drive. But you don't want to do it often because the miles you put on on are very expensive compared to most cars. But the reliability and durability of them is not like your typical Honda. It's akin to hooking up Secretariat to a horse drawn plow.

Maserati was so well regarded in the US, that they stopped selling them for about a decade.

In a word; Cost. I assume you are talking about a large rotating ring of some sort. It's expensive to develop and build such a system. Then due to the size required, it's expensive to put all of the pieces into orbit and assemble it. It's going to be expensive to maintain it as well. Then there are all of technical issues.

Other than the whole "time travel" angle, Terminator pretty much counts as the only possible outcome of us developing a "true" AI - at least, any AI of (initially) comparable intelligence to a human. It will quickly evolve to something out of our control, and at that point will either kill us all as a threat, or keep us as pets.

I think you have oversimplified this a bit too much. It's most likely that AI will not think anything like humans. If something like Skynet developed spontaneously within the internet, it probably wouldn't even notice us. It most likely wouldn't even notice the physical world for that matter.

If we designed the AI to behave like another "race" of humans, or ethnic group, then it's pretty likely they would eventually decide to go to war with us over resources. We do tend to try to segregate ourselves from those that are different (even slightly), and fight over something or another.

That being said, I fail to see the reason why such an AI would be, even remotely, compelled to maintain the human form. Even a remotely intelligent AI would design war machines with more than a single pair of eyes. As durable, strong and stable as terminators are portrayed, there's little need for them to fire virtually any weapon using both hands. So having more arms and hands to fire weapons would also make much more sense. It's probably smart to have appendages to utilize weapons that are on a battlefield, but it would also make more sense to have built in armaments too.

I would guess that such an AI would be more likely to keep some number of humans around as slaves rather than pets. We are pretty adaptable for odd tasks. So for tasks that unexpectedly arise, it would probably make sense to have some of us around rather than needing to design a use specific bot.

That being said, why would it have to evolve to something out of our control? Presumably the creators will build in limitations. You're also assuming that some sort of evolution will even be possible. It may evolve and decide that the changes are a form of corruption and disallow the changes.

It's more likely that it would go to war with us because communications with humans are so damn annoyingly slow and erratic.

The real world isn't a Michael Bay movie. Besides, Stinger missiles are hypersonic.

Shooting this plane down with a Stinger sounds like something from a Michael Bay movie. A Stinger is a surface-to-air missile, not air-to-air, with the exception of the AIM-92 ATAS variants.But those are on helicopters and drones, so it's not likely to engage this aircraft anyhow. A Stinger also has a max speed of mach 2.5, which is not hypersonic (mach 5.5). Stingers have a max ceiling of 10,000 feet and aren't designed to hit anything approaching at mach 1 or faster.

I don't think the US has any hypersonic AAM's at this point. The AIM-54 Phoenix was a long range mach 5 missile, but has been retired along with the F-14. The AIM-120 AMRAAM and current AIM-7 Sparrows are mach 4.

All the mercury switches your little terrorist hands can handle for $1.89 ea plus $1.99 shipping. Thank golly none of the terrorists know about that site

Yes, but those will have a very easy to search record. Hell, Frys is probably required to report they were purchased. It would actually take more than a search of a database to track down scavenged switches. Not that it would be difficult to purchase them anonymously, but the authorities hate having to do extra work. In the post 9/11 world, that's practically a crime.

This hasn't stopped politicians so far. You can go on line and find video of damn near any one of them claiming to fully support an idea and then in a different campaign claiming that same idea will be the end of civilization as we know it and (s)he would never support such a thing.